The presentations from the Making Information Pay conference organized by publishing consultants Mike Shatzkin and Ted Hill for the Book Industry Study Group are now up on the web.
Having attended the conference, I recommend checking out “The Customer’s Always Right: Who is Today’s Book Consumer?” by Kelly Gallagher of Bowker. His data-rich slides reveal fascinating customer behavior by age and gender that should be required reading for editors and publicists as well as booksellers, librarians, and media. In other words, a much wider audience than the publishing operations executives, indie and university press publishers and academics who attended the half-day program at the McGraw Hill Auditorium on May 7th.
Why does it always seem like the publishing rank and file are the last to be exposed to this crucial information? Oh well, I guess that’s where Follow the Reader can play a role.
Getting to Know the Customer
Gallagher prefaced his talk by arguing that we need to work harder to understand people who buy books, since they are buying them in new places and in new ways. As it happens, Bowker, one of the show’s sponsors, has a helpful product in this area: PubTrack, a syndicated consumer research service that delivers monthly stats based on responses from 36,000 book buyers–selected according to age, gender, income, household size and location–who buy 120,000 books over the course of 80,000 “shopping occasions,” and have signed on to answer 75-question surveys. Nice information, if you can afford it!
To his credit, Gallagher did share a lot of great information. For example, did you know…
Most readers now get book information online
- 67% of readers say they find reviews online vs. in traditional print media
- 54.8% rely on online/internet ads to find books
- 24.8% rely on retailer e-mails
Seniors are embracing e-readers and e-books
- Of Kindle owners, people 50 or older are the biggest adopters, followed by 18-34 year olds
- 35-49 year olds who read e-books prefer doing it on their iPhones
- But most people (48%) are still using their computers or laptops to read e-books
- E-book sales grew 183% among seniors aged 65+ and 174% among seniors aged 55-65
Sales channels skew by age
- Online is the #1 selling channel: 23% of the market vs. retail chains at 21%
- Younger readers are big supporters of bricks and-mortar retail, while older buyers tend to buy online
- 20% of all female buyers and 16% of female buyers 65+ buy books through traditional consumer book clubs
Here are more highlights for all the omnicurious number crunchers out there. There’s lots to chew on and discuss. We welcome your comments below!
Who was reading in 2008
- 45% of Americans read a book last year
- The average age of those who read a book was 44
- 58% of readers are women
- 32% of readers are over the age of 55
- The average reader spends 5.2 hours reading per week vs. 15 hours online and 13.1 hours watching TV (In 2008, going online surpassed watching TV as a primary activity)
Who was buying books in 2008
- 50% of Americans over 13 bought a book
- The average age of the most frequent book buyers was 50 years old
- 57% of book buyers are female and they buy 65% of books (e.g. women buy books and they buy in volume)
- 67% of books were bought by people over 42; Gen Xer bought 17% of books; Gen Y bought 10%
- Of books purchased by those who earn $100K or more, mystery and detective fiction represent 16% of sales, juvenile 13%, romance 6%, thrillers 4%, and comics and graphic novels 4%
- 41% of all books are purchased by those who earn less than $35K
- The average price of a book purchased last year was $10.08
- 31% of all book purchases are impulse buys
Who bought what digitally in 2008
- People 50 or older are leading the way in adopting the Kindle, followed by those 18-34
- People 35-49 prefer using their iPhones to read e-books
- But most people (48%) are still using their computers or laptops to read e-books
- While e-books are1.5% of the total book market, ebook sales grew 125% overall in 2008
- E-book sales grew 183% among seniors aged 65+ and 174% among seniors aged 55-65
Today’s fiction consumer
- Mystery/Detective and Romance account for more than half of all fiction people buy
- Fiction buyers in every category are predominantly female
Where people bought in 2008
- Online is the #1 selling channel: 23% of market, vs. retail chains at 21% (these numbers flipped in 2008 vs. 2007, when retail chains were at 23%)
- 21% of fiction was purchased online in 2008
- Younger readers are bigger supporters of bricks and-mortar retail while older buyers buy online
- Traditional book clubs (e.g. Bookspan) still capture significant part of older adult market – 20% female buyers and 16% of 65+ female buyers
How people became aware of books in 2008
- 67% say they see reviews online vs. in traditional print media
- 54.8% rely on online/internet ads to find books
- 24.8% rely on retailer e-mails
- 15.7% rely on ads in newspapers and magazines
- 21% of fiction purchases in 2008 were based on online awareness, with online book reviews the lead source of information (6.2%), followed by online ads (4.8%), the author’s personal website (4.6%), e-mails from retailers (3.2%), publisher’s website (2.9%) and online forums, blogs, Google and Yahoo searches (1.1%).
- Fantasy readers and romance readers are more active on social networks than thriller and mystery lovers
Please feel free to share your thoughts below. And please join us tomorrow (Friday, May 15) on Twitter from 4-5pm ET for our weekly publishing discussion at #followreader. To listen to our discussion in real time, go to Twitter Search and type in #followreader. To join in the discussion, follow @charabbott and @katmeyer on Twitter, and include #followreader into your responses.
I am a woman who reads so much I, alone, probably skewed that percentage of women who read. I also am “only” in my mid-40s, but will choose the Kindle over iPhone any day. Reading was basically bred into me, so I am so sad to hear that so many other people have not learned to be addicted to it. Fascinating article/study. Thanks.
[...] The New Book Buying Realities | Follow The Reader. [...]
[...] Here are some selected statistics from this informative post by Follow The Reader: [...]
thankyou for the information. It is priceless for me. I am putting togehter a book proporsal and these statistics will go a long way in presenting my startegy. Thankyou for all the hard work you put into this.
Jo Ann Hernandez
BronzeWord Latino Authors
http://authorslatino.com/wordpress
I just want to toss one tidbit out there.
“Younger readers are big supporters of bricks and-mortar retail, while older buyers tend to buy online”
My guess is that there are two explanations for this. One is that younger readers do not have credit cards, and thus do not have the ability to buy things online. That’s why Nintendo and Microsoft still sell points cards in stores for the Wii and XBox.
The second reason is that younger readers tend to have less disposable income for books. They love to go to retail and read off the shelf, especially the manga cows grazing in the aisles. Of course, all that grazing does result in some amount of buying.
“…the half-day program at the McGraw Hill Auditorium on May 7th…”
What half day program on the 7th? Are you talking about Digital Book 2009? That was a 2 day conference on the 11th and 12th.
this was the Making Information Pay (MIP) program that was sponsored by BISG which took place on the Thursday before the IDPF conference held in the same space.
[...] The New Book Buying RealitiesCharlotte Abbott rights about the interesting numbers and trends revealed at the Making Information Pay conference. She’s right: this is the stuff we should all be talking about. [...]
[...] The New Book Buying RealitiesCharlotte Abbott rights about the interesting numbers and trends revealed at the Making Information Pay conference. She’s right: this is the stuff we should all be talking about. [...]
[...] a few weeks ago, with fresh statistics drawn from a monthly survey of 36,000 readers that we recapped in our most popular post to date. His look at where books fit into the general cultural mix is also likely to be [...]
[...] The New Book Buying Realities Lots and Lots of percentages about who buys what by Charlotte Abbott. If you want to know what and for who you should be aiming at, read this. [...]
[...] number one purchase online were books and that 41% of internet users had bought books online. Bowker reported in May of 2009 that internet is the number 1 retail channel for books at 23% of the market followed by retail [...]
As a new writer preparing his proposal and to check his market portion, thank you. This will go a long way.
[...] an interesting statistic tucked in the middle of a post last year at Follow the Reader on book-buying patterns: “31% of all book purchases are impulse buys”. These numbers [...]
[...] an interesting statistic tucked in the middle of a post last year at Follow the Reader on book-buying patterns: “31% of all book purchases are impulse buys”. These numbers [...]
Thank you so much for this information. It’s really helpful.
[...] to a 2009 study by the Book Industry Study Group on the behaviors of the modern reader, most people now get book [...]
Hi y’all…very interesting accumulation of information about readers/book-buyers, etc. At 75 I’m still writing and have current books available direct from my website. I don’t believe it’ll be too many years before books, (actual paper books) as we know them, will no longer fill the shelves of bookstores, so it’s vital that folks like y’all keep introducing young readers to Kindle and the other e-readers that are available. Magazines and newspapers are already falling like flies in the wake of a crop duster…just costs too much to print ‘em…a lot of old school readers are swearing they’ll never use ‘one of those damn electronic hickies to read books’… they were the same people that said, ‘I’ll never shop in those damn Chinese Wal*Mart stores.’ Anything that will get people back to reading [by any means] will be an asset to authors. Reading, as we who have done it most of our lives, is addictive. Whatever it takes to get someone, young or old, to read, will pay off in blue chips. At 75 my dad had never read a book…I began reading to him small sections (pre-planned by me and my wife) of Louis L’Amour…at the most exciting point I put the book down, saying, “Sorry, dad, but I promised Dottie I would cut her hair”…or whatever excuse I needed to stop reading…”No, no, finish this part anyway.”…”Sorry, dad, maybe later.”…about the third time, he snatched the book from me and began reading. By the time he died at 88 he’d read all of L’Amour (I had the entire collection) and about half of Zane Grey, and all of the books that I have written. What you’re doing is great…keep it up.
Rick Magers
magersrick@yahoo.com
Good information! Would love to see an update of this information now that the price of e-readers have come down significantly and are available in places like Target. Thanks!
Breaking news: Women like to purchase, read and talk about books http://angielippard.blogspot.com/2010/08/breaking-news-women-like-to-purchase.html
[...] know, readers learn about what to read next from a physical bookstore. It’s an old news, but buying patterns are [...]
Thanks to the electronic reading devices, from desktops to smartphones and e-readers, the overall percentage of reading people in general is probably the same as ever or perhaps even greater. The Internet has made reading more accessible and digitized text on a fashionable gadget’s high resolution screen might be more appealing to those young people who grew up in traditionally “non-reading” families. As printed text is being gradually replaced by digital one, reading paper books and magazines becomes more a thing of aesthetic value in itself, whereas electronic text a necessity and a way of our daily lives. It is interesting that as the traditional book stores are closing and going out of business their customers become increasingly the target market of rapidly expanding e-book industry.